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Welp, George Santos is caught in another lie:  Via MSNBC, WNBC in New York reports that after a thorough search of police records dating from January 2019, only one report contains any record of Santos–or Anthony Devolder.  And that record was from a 2021 incident where he claimed his neighbor threw garbage at him–and missed.  (The merits of that complaint are unknown.)

Santos has claimed at various times that he was once mugged in broad daylight in Manhattan and the mugger took…. his shoes.  (According to MSNBC’s reporting, no police record reflects a mugging where shoes were stolen from the victim’s feet.). He also claimed that he was the target of an assassination attempt.

Now the former one might be dismissed as unreported because of the jaded “Well, the police won’t do anything” attitude, but an assassination attempt?  First, someone had to thwart the assassination attempt otherwise it would have been an assassination.  Second, someone, presumably law enforcement, would have had to tell Santos about it.  And third, it’s George Santos.  Santos also claimed that he had a “police escort” due to the threats.  You guessed it:  the NYPD could find no record of any such detail.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the DC Federal District Court, hearing a criminal case about anti-choice activists blocking access to an abortion clinic on Monday, questioned whether the Supreme Court’s controversial Dobbs decision addressed all Constitutional rights for abortion, leading to the possibility of a challenge to re-assert the right, Politico reports.

A Clinton appointee, Kollar-Kotelly told lawyers to prepare arguments concerning the possibility that Dobbs only addressed the legal arguments against abortion as raised in Roe v. Wade, but failed to fully revoke the right to choose because the right is included in other parts of the Constitution, specifically in Kollar-Kotelly’s view in the 13th Amendment.

The question is addressable by this court because one of the defendants claims an included conspiracy charge is now moot because the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision removed the Constitution right to an abortion.  “There is no longer a federal constitutional interest to protect, and Congress lacks jurisdiction,” the defendant’s attorneys wrote in their motion to dismiss the charge. “The Dobbs court did not indicate that there is no longer a constitutional right to abortion; the court has made clear there never was.”

A report written by the Air Force in April 2022 described the flight of a Chinese balloon that circumnavigated the globe, floating by the Hawaiian islands and transiting Florida in 2019 without any alarm raised by the Trump Administration, CNN reports.  The existence of a report from that era shows the American national security apparatus was aware of the Chinese balloon program prior to this month’s intrusion into US airspace.

The report was part of an intelligence assessment of Chinese intelligence capability, parts of which were provided to CNN.  The assessment notes that China was developing a balloon program that could operate between altitudes of 65,000 and 350,000 feet, the edge of space (or actual space, depending on what definition you use).  The 2019 circumnavigation of the globe reportedly was done largely around 65,000 feet.

For a conservative who says he couldn’t care less about Hollywood and celebrities and the arts because it’s all run by Liberal Elites (which is not the name of the top R&B band in Sewell County, Kansas), Fox host and prep school Latin teacher all the girls find creepy Tucker Carlson apparently hate-watches an awful lot of awards shows to find out who’s popular, like English pop star Sam Smith, who’s everything Carlson hates:  Gay, genderqueer, popular and talented.  Smith’s over-the-top performance infuriates (and likely titillated) Carlson, a fact you can tell by the amount of his girlish laughter. “Tonight’s transgender Satanism brought to you by Pfizer.  [Laugh] Inject it into your bodies!  [Chortle],” Carlson emotes after his guest’s voice breaks into something out of the Land of Misfit Toys.

Soon, humans will be superfluous even for conversations:  Google has announced its challenger to the groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot tool introduced by OpenAI late last year, CNN reports.

Called “Bard,” Google’s version will also be able to assemble credible dialogue and idea formation based on the available information it compiles and analyzes.  Google made Bard a priority after ChatGPT received widespread praise for its ability to create a variety of text, from essays, to song lyrics, to news stories.  The fact that ChatGPT’s introduction pushed OpenAI’s market value to $29 billion also likely influenced Google’s decision; the stock price of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has fallen about 40% since ChatGPT’s introduction in November.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said in a statement. “It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”

Acknowledging at least five previous Chinese balloon flights over the United States, the head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command stated the incursions spotlighted a recently-released hole in US national security, the Washington Post writes.

“As NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America,” Air Force General Glen D. VanHerck said at a Monday media briefing.  “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.”

VanHerck said that elements in the US intelligence community informed him of the previous overflights “after the fact;” previous reporting said the Biden Administration had pushed for greater vigilance regarding Chinese activities, pushing for a review of previous intelligence which uncovered the balloon flights that occurred during the previous administration.  Members of Biden’s administration have reached out to befuddled and ignorant members of the Trump cabal to offer them briefings on the matter, presumably only if their security clearances are in order.

The House GOP are planning to flex their legislative muscle with a resolution saying ChiCom spy balloons are bad for America, CNN’s Alayna Treene reports, adding that they’re probably not going to condemn Biden or mention the response at all, but just stick to China.

Warning residents to leave immediately or risk physical harm, emergency officials plan to release the toxic gases being stored in five train cars that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, with Republican Governor Mike DeWine saying, “You need to leave, you just need to leave. This is a matter of life and death,” according to the Associated Press.

A spokesman for Norfolk Southern Railway said the process would involve using a small charge to open a hole in each of the tankers, allowing the gases to dissipate in the air.  Officials are calling for the complete evacuation of the area because, as the spokesman noted, ““We can’t control where that goes.”  He noted there is also the potential for each car to explode, sending debris and shrapnel rocketing throughout the area, which includes the town of East Palestine and around 20 properties in neighboring Pennsylvania.

Emergency crews were pulled away from the 50-car derailment hours after the accident late Friday night after crews from five states responding to the scene were told one of the cars contained vinyl chloride, a dangerous and potentially explosive chemical.  In fact, five of the cars contain the dangerous chemical.  Although officials have not yet specified the cause of the accident, members of the three-person crew aboard the train reported receiving a warning that there was a warning signal from one of the cars’ axle just prior to the derailment.

Along with Bill O’Reilly, novelist Newt Gingrich has led the effort to rewrite American history, and now he wants to rewrite physics and US military capability.  Gingrich insists the US government has the equipment and capability to have captured, safely and intact, the 120+ foot-long Chinese surveillance balloon traveling at 60,000 feet whose cargo alone weighs an estimated 2,000 pounds.  Where this capability exists is questionable:  at one time, the US military ran a program using the Fulton system (also known as Skyhook) to extract individuals using a guide balloon to lift a rope, tied to the extractee, that was caught by a specially-equipped cargo plane, typically a C-130, but those lifts were smaller weight, lower altitude and had one point connected to the ground; Fulton was last acknowledged to be used in a 1982 training exercise in which a serviceman was killed.

Another process, used to capture small cylinders of dust sample, allowed planes operated by NASA to catch a small canopy parachute as it fell to Earth after reentry; it succeeded about half the time.  (The US military reportedly used a similar process–with similar success–to capture top-secret satellite film, a process that has not been used since the age of digital transmissions.) Gingrich apparently believes the technology to capture a 15-pound film canister on a 8-foot parachute is the same as that needed to stop a one-ton platform on a 120-foot-long weather balloon.

The death toll from a series of devastating earthquakes that centered in south-central Turkey on Monday rose to 3,400 in less than 24 hours since the tremors flattened buildings across the region and into neighboring northern Syria, officials in both countries said, per the AP.

Tens of thousands of civilians in both nations were left homeless amid fucking brutal cold rain and snow, heaping more misery on a region torn by civil war and a refugee crisis for more than a decade since a 2011 uprising against Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Asad. Assistance began pouring in from other nations across the globe as tens of thousands were believed still trapped underneath the rubble of buildings across the vast areas affected by the two 7.0+ magnitude earthquakes and aftershocks.

The leadership of the Republican majority Virginia House of Delegates let a procedural deadline expire Monday on bills that had not yet gotten a hearing and thus ending the bills’ chances of getting passed this session, among them HB 1562, which would have barred people convicted of participating in an insurrection from “positions of public trust,” such as teaching, law enforcement, health care, and running for elected office, Virginia Public Media reports.

INFLATION.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.
SPY BALLOON.

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) February 6, 2023

Portly North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un hasn’t been seen in public for at least 35 days, raising concerns among fans that he might be dead or in a coma or something, the Telegraph reports.

Kim has disappeared for similarly long stretches in the past, most recently in 2021, but the upcoming parade for the NK military’s 75th anniversary will be a key moment in determining whether the chunky “nepo-baby” bastard (or a convincing body double) is still alive and marginally lucid.

Responding to a particularly insane lie by George Santos, in which he claimed to have been one of the producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark – reportedly the greatest flop in Broadway history, losing $60 million for its investors during its run in 2011 – the actual former producers on Monday released a statement, saying “Of all the tribulations the producers of Spider Man had to endure, we are very pleased, proud and relieved to report working with George Santos was not one of them.”

If it’s true the Pentagon purposely did NOT tell President Trump of Chinese Spy Balloons during his administration then we had a serious breach in command during the Trump admin.

The POTUS is the Commander in Chief.

We must investigate and hold accountable those who broke rank.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) February 6, 2023

On Monday morning the collective MAGA hive mind switched from “that story about ChiCom spy balloons entering US airspace at least three times during the Trump Administration is bullshit” to “the Deep State military kept them hidden from President Trump.” It’s not clear precisely what new information prompted the goal posts to be relocated, as normally right wingers are impervious to facts and evidence that challenge their narrative, but whatever it was it’s plainly frustrating to them that they could no longer act like it was simply Joe Biden and Democrats making it up.

Republican Senators Ron “RonAnon” Johnson and Chuck “Should Be Pushing Up” Grassley, New Age “Hindu” death cult member former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and some washout former FBI agent calling herself a “whistleblower” Nicole Parker will be the star witnesses of grapple freak Jim Jordan’s “Weaponization” select subcommittee hearing on Thursday, CNN’s Annie Grayer reports.

What a joke. The best they can get for witnesses are two currently serving Republicans from the other chamber and fucking Tulsi Gabbard. Okay, maybe Parker could theoretically say something actually material to the investigation. RonAnon and Grassley might be the funniest, that their own anti-Deep State “investigations” have been ignored in the Senate so now they have to go under oath to talk about it in the House. That’s somehow even sadder than Gabbard being a witness.

A 27-year-old Maryland neo-Nazi and his 34-year-old girlfriend he met while incarcerated have been charged with plotting to knock out power stations around Maryland, the latest in a string of criminal and anti-government domestic terrorists attacks on the nation’s power grid, the Washington Post reports.  Brandon Russell, the founder of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen, and Sarah Beth Clendaniel are charged with conspiring to destroy an energy facility, sabotage similar to attacks in North Carolina, Washington and other areas.   They face up to twenty years in prison if convicted.

The exact manner in which the two met while both were in prison is unspecified; Russell was in federal custody for possessing bombmaking materials and Clendaniel was in a Maryland facility for robbing convenience stores armed with a machete with the help of a 59-year-old male accomplice.  Both are still on probation for their previous charges.    “Going to prison was worth it because I might not have met you otherwise,” Russell said in one text to Clendainiel, prior to his latest run-in that will likely end in another jail sentence.

The “ReAwaken America” tour, which are basically just a fucked up QAnon version of TED Talks, has always been a total freak show, featuring maniacs like Mike Flynn, Texas AG Ken Paxton, former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, Mike Lindell, Dr Stella “Demon Sperm Lady” Immanuel, the Michigan booze lady, Lin Wood, and others. One of the newer additions to the roster, Eric Trump’s pal Scott McKay, however takes it even further with his anti-semitic batshittery, according to Media Matters.

The rundown of McKay’s conspiracies includes his beliefs that the 9/11 attacks, the Lincoln, Kennedy, and McKinley assassinations, the Oklahoma City bombing, and all sorts of other horrible acts were perpetrated by “the same group of people that has done a very good job at hiding under the religion of Judaism,” which he says are the “Khazarian Mafia,” whatever the fuck that means.

I’m headed to Iowa on Friday, February 10th for a Meet & Greet hosted by the Scott County Republican Women!

I hope to see you there!

REGISTER ⤵️https://t.co/9BQ4WNdXzd pic.twitter.com/7BF9MXNrAw

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) February 6, 2023

Like lots of other politicians with a track record of successful campaigns, the “duly elected” Governor of Arizona Kari Lake is headed to Iowa on an exciting trip to “test the waters” for a presidential run, while loser Katie Hobbs is stuck in Phoenix doing boring office paperwork.

A MAGA Pennsylvania family of three were found dead in their backyard last month may have ended it over disgraced former President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, NBC News reports.

Cops in West Manchester Township last week announced the results of their investigation after James Daub, 62, his 59 year-old wife Deborah, and 26 year-old daughter Morgan were found dead of gunshots outside their home on January 25th, with officials having determined it was a “joint decision” based on a note left at the scene. Friends and neighbors described the Daubs as hardcore Evangelical Trump fans who had ghosted after the fat orange fuck lost reelection in 2020.

“They were just so hell-bent on Trump winning, like this could be in the end if he doesn’t,” said Bret Stabley, manager at the Bowlers Supply in York, Pennsylvania where Deborah and Morgan Daub had been frequent customers prior to the 2020 election but disappeared afterward.

The National Suicide Prevention Hotline in the United States is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 1-800-273-8255 or 988. Please call or text if you need to talk to someone.